Shoppers rarely buy on the first visit. They look, they leave, they come back two days later and cannot find the thing they liked. A recently-viewed list is the cheapest fix in ecommerce: it hands people back their own browsing history the moment they return. WooCommerce quietly records that history already, in a cookie its own block reads, but getting it onto an Elementor-built page usually means fighting the core widget’s activation rules. The Recently Viewed widget reads the same cookie directly and renders it server-side. Sentio built the Elementor Recently Viewed widget so that list can sit anywhere on a site without a shortcode or a sidebar.
What Is the Recently Viewed Widget?
The Recently Viewed widget shows each visitor the products they have already opened, newest first. It reads WooCommerce’s native recently viewed cookie, which means it agrees with the rest of the store rather than keeping a private list of its own, and it installs the tracking itself so the history is recorded even on sites where the core widget is never activated. Four layouts ship in one dropdown — a column grid, a carousel, a narrow sidebar stack and a single-line ticker. Products are rendered on the server as the page loads, so there is no AJAX round trip and no flash of empty space. Every Elementor Recently Viewed instance reads the same cookie, so a widget in the footer and one in a sidebar always show the same list.
Key Features of the Recently Viewed Widget
- Four layouts — grid with a configurable column count, carousel, sidebar stack, or a compact scrolling ticker, each with its own gap and hover effect.
- Server-side rendering — the products are in the HTML on first paint, with no AJAX request and nothing to wait for.
- Uses WooCommerce’s own cookie — no extra database tables, no separate history, and no divergence from what the rest of the store thinks the shopper has seen.
- Practical controls — cap the number of items, exclude the product currently being viewed, add a clear-history button, and set the message shown when the list is empty.
Why Use the Recently Viewed Widget on Your Site?
Returning visitors convert far better than first-time ones, and the friction they hit is almost always the same: they cannot re-find the product. The Recently Viewed widget removes that. A coffee roaster can put a four-column grid at the foot of the shop so anyone coming back lands on their own shortlist. A homeware store can run the carousel across a category page, where it acts as a personalised row that costs nothing to curate. A minimal shop can use the ticker as a single quiet line under the header. Because it excludes the product currently on screen, it never wastes a slot telling someone about the page they are already reading, and because the history is a cookie rather than an account, it works for logged-out shoppers, which is most of them. The same Elementor Recently Viewed setup needs no maintenance once placed — the list curates itself from real behaviour.
Getting Started With Recently Viewed in Minutes
Install Sentio Addons on a store running WooCommerce and drop the Elementor Recently Viewed widget wherever returning visitors land — a shop footer, a category page, a sidebar. Pick a layout and, for the grid, a column count. Set how many products to remember, decide whether to exclude the one currently being viewed, and choose a hover effect. Add a heading if the placement needs one, switch on the clear-history button if you want shoppers to be able to reset it, and write the empty-state message that shows before anyone has browsed. Everything else is styling, and the card, heading and spacing each have their own controls.
See the Recently Viewed Widget in Action
The widget page above this article starts empty on purpose, because it has nothing to show until you have looked at something. Open one of the products at the top of the page, come back, and all three examples fill at once — grid, carousel and ticker, reading the same cookie.
The best personalisation is the kind that needs no data science behind it. Reach for the Recently Viewed widget for Elementor and every returning shopper gets their own shortlist, assembled from what they actually did. Sentio Addons keeps building practical, design-system-friendly widgets like this because publishing teams need real tools, not toy components.